Woolf: Bigger tab for fewer Vermont school kids

Summer is nearly over, at least if we measure summer by summer vacation ending for the 85,000 Vermont students enrolled in public schools. That's less than last year. Indeed, enrollment in Vermont's schools has been falling for nearly two decades since it peaked in the mid-1990s at more than 105,000.

The last time Vermont schools enrolled as few students as we have today was probably back in the 1950s, when the baby boom generation was beginning to fill up the state's, and nation's, schools. The boomers continued to add to the school-age population through the mid-1970s, when 105,000 students were enrolled in Vermont's public schools.

By the mid-1980s, enrollments had fallen to 90,000 but as the Boomers aged and had children of their own, Vermont's school population increased. It's one of those historical coincidences that the recent peak enrollment of 105,000 in the mid-1990s was identical to the mid-1970s peak.

But the mid and late 20th century cycle of declining enrollments followed by an increase is unlikely to be repeated in the 21st century.

Based on the state's most recent population forecast, I estimate that the number of students in Vermont's schools will decline for the foreseeable future. By 2020 student enrollment will be down to 82,000, and continue to drop to only 77,000 by 2030—more than a 25 percent decline from the mid-1990s peak.

Why won't the future see an increase similar to what happened between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s? There are several reasons.

First, that enrollment increase was caused, in large part, by the Baby Boomers' children. Those children are now having their own children. And that generation, the Millennials, were born between the early 1980s and the turn of the century. They have a very low fertility rate, so there won't be many births to women of that generation and therefore not many kids entering schools six years after those births.

Second, Vermont's population is aging, with a smaller and smaller number of 25- to 45-year-olds — the age group that has children living with them. That is, there won't be as many millennial families with children as there were for the Baby Boomers or their parents.

Finally, with very few people moving into the state — either immigrants from other nations or people from other states — there is no external source of children to fill Vermont's classrooms.

Is it possible that any of those patterns will reverse? Certainly. Young women in Vermont could decide to have more babies than they currently do. More young people could move into Vermont. We could attract more immigrants or people from other states. But there's no evidence that any of that is happening today, or will happen in the future.

It is also possible that enrollments could increase as schools enroll children under the age of 6 into preschool programs. But that does not alter the fundamental fact of a declining number of 6- to 18-year-olds.

What will be the fallout from this continuing enrollment decline? If I was looking at this from the perspective of 20 years ago, the first thing I would predict would be that with such a big enrollment decline, education costs and the property taxes used to fund Vermont schools would certainly decline, or at least the growth in spending and taxes would decline.

I would, of course, have been wrong. As the number of students in Vermont schools has declined — and we've experienced the second largest decline of any state — our total education spending has increased faster than all but seven other states.

Looking at the future enrollment trajectory, I would like to think that our education spending growth will moderate. But spending is not just determined by the number of students. It's also based on the price of education to taxpayer-voters.

It's very likely that in response to the large number of school budget defeats, and to increasing dissatisfaction with high property taxes, the Legislature will soon move to reduce property taxes and replace those lost revenues with some other tax, most likely an income tax.

But if most voters don't see the link between rising education costs and their own tax bill, education spending is likely to continue rising faster than in most other states.